NASA and Russia’s space agency canceled the spacewalk of two Russian cosmonauts preparing to exit the International Space Station late Wednesday, due to an apparent leak of coolant from an attached space capsule.
NASA’s Johnson Space Center said Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and other astronauts on the space station were not in danger. Cosmonauts were dressed in space suits and depressurized an airlock when the leak appeared in a live video broadcast.
This was the second time Russian cosmonauts canceled the spacewalk. As with the first attempt on November 25, the duo had planned to move the radiator from one module attached to the space station to another. On this first attempt, a problem arose with the coolant pumps on the cosmonauts’ Russian-made Orlan spacesuits.
At Wednesday’s incident, ground experts saw a stream of liquids and particles, as well as a pressure drop on the instruments, in a live video feed from space emanating from the Soyuz MS-22 capsule carrying Prokopyev and Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio. The leak continued from the Soyuz capsule docked to one of the space station’s modules hours after its discovery.
The cosmonauts applied pressure to the airlock, removed their spacesuits, and re-entered the space station, NASA reported.
Russia’s space agency and NASA planned to investigate the Soyuz leak to determine how the capsule might have been affected. It was not immediately clear what effect the leak would have on the crew’s mission.
There are four astronauts and a cosmonaut on the space station.